Never Walked In High Heels

“He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither.” ~Ben Franklin

One of my favorite things about living where I do is that I get to see men who have yet to give up their sense of adventure. Some of them have passed forty and still live on boats with no wives or children. Their homes sometimes seem like an adult version of a tree house as I pass them. They stick their heads out and greet me, asking if I need help with anything today. These are the friends I call when I am stuck in central London with a dead battery or suddenly find myself in a sticky situation. They are unshaven, unabashed, and all together untamed.

In the circles I was raised, men like this are pretty much nonexistent. The males we have are like old circus bears who perform a few ticks on command, but are old and have been declawed. The bars placed on the circus cages are to give a feeling that the beast is unsafe despite how aged he actually is. Although I have my theories, I’m not sure whose ‘fault’ it actually is. What I am sure of is that these men, somehow or another, have entered into a safe world of suits and status quos where they often married before they knew who they were, to avoid some unknown darkness. They have become tamed because the world around them requires it. All opportunity for adventure disappears when people demand that men play it ‘safe.’

My point is not that we should encourage men to be reckless or even brutish. Real men possess self control as much as they do power. But what I am emphasizing is that on insisting on safe lives, perfect homes, and taming passion, we trade away our freedoms. And in doing so, we (for lack of a better word) castrate our men. Then we wonder ‘where have all the men gone?’

The men around here are still often feral even on their best behavior. Most of them are far from having a stable life, but by my count I don’t expect them to. In keeping their company, they don’t expect me to stay in my ‘place’ either. They don’t comment about how I shouldn’t be out in inaccessible places or calling them when I need to get out during a snow storm. They are the first to offer help but the last to enforce limits. I know that each of us are fully functional individuals who treasure our freedom. Because we know we are each independent, there is a community where each of us is valued. Watching them be the fullest men they can be, raising sails and rebuilding their boats with calloused hands and amazing stamina, helps me to realize what it means to be a better woman than I thought I could be.

At what age can you disagree with people who used to be your elders?

During a recent conversation, I had to listen to a former tutor of mine essentially tell me how to run my life. He hadn’t seen me in three years and the difference between a 22 year old and a 25 year old is often striking- or at least I hope it is. Every argument he made, I knew as according to my own life, that factually he was wrong, but he didn’t want to hear about my successes. He only heard in his mind that I was a failure and needed to get out of the situation that I was currently in. Eventually, I intended to hang up on him, but decided this would be disrespectful. He was after all, a great mentor of mine and had helped create me as the woman I was—even though currently, that woman was highly irritated.

The problem with correcting your elders is that to them you’ll always be young. You’ll always be in need of their advice and mentorship, and they will always –numerically at least- have more life experience than you. As a kid I was constantly reminded to be respectful of my elders. Phrases such as “Don’t talk to him in that tone young lady” or “He’s done a lot for you. You might want to show a little gratitude once in a while,” continue to haunt me when I want to speak out against bad advice. So more often than not, even though I’m opinionated, I keep my mouth shut and try to let my superior come to his own conclusions.

But any relationship across generations, be it parent to child or student to teacher, changes as the younger individual grows up. It has to. If the adult doesn’t let the relationship change, it will be forever damaged, and if the younger doesn’t force the relationship to change he will be forever coddled by his mentor. Growing up across an intergenerational relationship can prove to be extremely difficult and damaging to both parties, but it has to be done. The switch between a vertical relationship (for example, teacher and child) to a horizontal relationship (such as peers) has to make that switch in order to still function.

But at some point during that switch from vertical to horizontal, you realize as you grow up that no adult has all the answers. In fact, many of them have just a few more than even you do. People make up their lives as they go, and that’s okay as long as they give you the freedom to do likewise. That moment where you realize that nobody knows everything, can be a combination of one of the most frightening but also liberating moments you will ever face. At that point, the world is truly yours, and we, regardless of age are all equal and trying to get by.

Older generations will always try to warn you against their mistakes, which is good, as well as fruitful because your mistakes should always be your own and if that means repeating the exact same ones that your parents created, at least make sure that you put your own special stamp of dysfunction on it. Don’t let people use you to fix their own past. What that is, is what I call a recycled life. People who didn’t succeed at living their lives for themselves that first time, and so they will try and make you live their lives now. And sometimes you may even have a revelation before one of your elders does, and that’s okay. If they are honest with themselves and with you, they will admit that they are still learning to grow up as well.

“Hi. Why are you still in the UK? I hate London. I hated it when I was there three years ago. Nobody is friendly…I don’t get what you’re doing spending your time over there.”

This was how he opened his phone call to me. The next hour was a barrage of attacks about how not everyone got what they wanted out of life and it was time for me to come home. Every time I pointed out that I owned my own company or that I was paying my rent just fine, it didn’t seem to matter. Then came the killer statement, “What you need to do is move to New York City and write about being disabled for disabled people.” It was a suggestion that was completely impractical. I’ve never been to New York and I don’t know anyone in the entire state. The suggestion was insidious as it prayed on my faults and immature desires to quit and go home after a difficult year. But when you know it’s the wrong thing to do, and the last thing you need to hear is that you should quit and go back home. It was insulting because after 10 years of knowing me, all he thought I was capable of doing was writing at my desk to a 100% disabled audience.

If the phone call had been from a family member, I would have been able to handle it better. But this was one of my best friends—someone who had taught me since I was 15. I sat in the back of his classroom with my hand raised for three years asking questions and learning about the world as he saw it. A high school teacher’s job is to prepare his students to face the frightening prospects of an infinite universe, and to equip those students with the tools they need to succeed beyond there wildest dreams. This was the man who taught me that my mind and my capacity for thought and innovation was unlimited and a great gift to be embraced. He was even a man who went to bat for me against the high school administration, insisting that I would not be put in a special education classroom and swearing up and down that doing so would be a “grave injustice to her mind.”

And here he was now, not recommending or even insisting, but it felt like demanding, that I quit and move back to the States in order to go the safe route. “Most people want A, B, and C out of life but they don’t get A, B, and C. They have to settle for E, D, F. You’re job is to figure out what kind of E, D, and F you have to offer the world.” Is this the same person that I read Catcher and the Rye with? The same man who told me stories about going to Morocco and encouraged me to do likewise after college graduation? He had been one of my support structures and was now feeding me platitudes about life that I wouldn’t have even thought him to believe.

I finally hung up on him after and hour. I couldn’t take anymore. He continued despite my insistence that I was paying my rent, I was learning from the real world, and there were things in London I couldn’t leave. “Like what?” he questioned indignantly. Like the company, my company and the friends I’ve found over the past three years, all of the professional connections I had built up, my home, my church, my life. Even though the going was tough, I couldn’t just get up and walk away from it.

After a few days of cooling off, I realized that one of two things had happened. Not seeing him for three years meant that I no longer knew him, and he no longer knew me. Either way there was a rift, and given his response to my pleads and insistences that he see the truth, I wasn’t sure I wanted to fix it. His mid 20s may have been the time that he decided to leave Morocco to come back home and teach, but I wasn’t ready to do anything of the sort even as noble as teaching was. I still feel deeply called to take on the challenges of the unfamiliar and boundless world he taught me about. Not going to familiar territory to receive the consistent paycheck and live the easy life. When I was younger, he challenged me to do exactly what I am doing. His current insistence of dropping what I am doing just because it is difficult doesn’t fit with the worldview that he helped to give me. And so, although I’m not sure who it was I talked to over the phone, I refuse to go home and lead the comfortable life. If that means I am a disappointment, or so beyond what a mentor thought I was capable of then so be it. Part of growing up is realizing that nobody has all the answers, and that we’re all really trying to get by on a ninth grader’s wet shoestring. The second we realize that about ourselves, our parents, our mentors, and everyone else we meet, the horizons open up and you see the freedom to make yourself and this world what you want it to be—something you never knew you had.

             It’s the mother lode of clichés. You hear the recording full of static as Roosevelt takes a deep breath. “The only thing we have to fear is…” dramatic pause. Yeah, I get it, I know what you’re going to say. Come on, come on, come on… “fear itself!” The punch line has been delivered, and we can all go back to dismissing the bromide all Americans have heard a thousand times before.

              I’m sure when FDR made that speech he wasn’t expecting it to be replayed until it had lost all meaning for future generations. I never really thought too much about it until this weekend, when I found myself coming from a small town paralyzed by fear and then it took on a whole new meaning. What I always assumed it to mean was that people had nothing to fear and that there was this feeling out there called fear which was only for fools to react.

              And then this weekend I spent time with people who lived in stagnant fear. Not terror mind you, but plain, simple, fear. The difference is striking. People all over the world live in justifiable terror where there is unspeakable violence, horrible threats, and a justifiable unknown of what tomorrow may bring. According to the Oxford American dictionary, fear is classified as “a belief” which, by definition may or may not be based in fact. Conversely, terror is “a state” caused by something directly. Terror, it seems, is concrete and is caused by dangers whereas fear, is not. The people that I am speaking of live in fear, although of exactly what I do not know.

              I know they are living in fear because fear is paralyzing. This is what I have failed to notice about Roosevelt’s statement until now, the reason we must be afraid of fear is because this emotion, above all others, stops us dead in our tracks. By definition, you cannot run from a belief because there is no way to tell what direction leads towards safety. Fear lurks around every corner because it manifests itself in your mind. Thus, your entire world begins to shrink down to where the shadows don’t reach. But any wall brings its own manufactured shadow.

              I could give you the specifics of the fearful nature of the people I spent my weekend with, but in truth it seems like they’re mere generalities describing the fearful times we live in today. One woman was afraid the world was ending, another that her money would soon be worthless so she refused to spend any of it. There was a farmer afraid of fixing his tractor because of what his co-operative would think of his budget, and a kid refusing to go to school because he may fail out. These are the nebulous fears which follow us all and a person from a different demographic may even call them worries. But they each, in one form or another, stop life.

              Perhaps it took another economically tough time for me to understand what fear actually is. I would hear that there was only one thing to fear and wonder what anyone could feel staring down the barrel of a gun which Roosevelt would deem an appropriate response. But as a man with polio, I’m guessing he knew fear and he knew terror. He knew the terror of a body slowly destroying itself across the hours, and the fears of having to figure out how to live life all over again. No doubt he saw that each was very different. And while terror causes you to embrace life as you’ve never gone after it before, fear can only lead to shunning it altogether. And while there are plenty of dark forces out there, the most frightening is the one in which you willingly surrender life.